THE SHOE ON THE OTHER FOOT

I hadn’t had sex in a long time. Between work and personal commitments, I barely had a social life, let alone time for random hookups.

The day I hung out with my friend, Pink Panther, at my place during a weekend, I found myself lamenting to him: “Help a brother out abeg. I’m tired. My whole body seems to be shutting down. I need to get laid!”

Pinky simply laughed at my theatrics and asked if I’d given Grindr a try. I told him that the kito alerts that seemed to originate from Grindr had managed to turn me off the app.

“What about Tinder?” he asked.

I’d heard of Tinder, but I didn’t know how it worked. So, he set me up on the app, and I was soon swiping away. But the time and patience required to carry on with chatversations before getting around to arranging for a meet (because some people didn’t want the first date to be about sex) was just not permitted by the erratic and hectic schedule of my work. So, I was on Tinder, and still I wasn’t getting what I needed.

I just wanted an easy fuck, with no stress on the way to getting it.

Then one evening, I was on a WhatsApp chat with Pinky, when – as though the thought had suddenly occurred to him – he said, “Oh that’s right. I’ve been meaning to tell you about this guy I recently hooked up with. He’s cool and everything. The only problem is that he is massively well hung. I don’t even know what I was thinking when I invited him over, but I really couldn’t take his dick. It is BIG. I could feel his disappointment that night, and the next morning, as I saw him off, I thought about you as someone I could hook him up with.”

Upon reading this, I felt a slight swell of mortification. So, this is what my friends think of me, I thought to myself. That I’m the power bottom who can take what they can’t. My mangina is now the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway that whatever kind of vehicle can easily go through, abi?

Then a voice interrupted my train of thought with: Who are you kidding? You know you are a size queen. Own it. You know you like big dicks. Better stop feeling precious right now.

A new message from Pinky dropped in: “So, if you’re interested, I could talk to him about you, and then pass his number on to you.”

If you’re interested?!!!

Was this pikin mad? Of course, I was interested!

So, a few minutes later, Pinky sent me the number of the guy (who we shall call Vince). I saved it and sought him out on WhatsApp. I said hi and he said hello. Pinky had already briefed him on everything, so that made the connection easy as we began chatting. As we chatted, he said he’d recognised me from Tinder. Apparently, he’d swiped right on my profile first, and after I swiped right on his, consequently connecting with him, he’d been waiting for me to send him a message.

“Seeing as you’re the one who swiped last,” he said, “you were supposed to send me a message.”

I didn’t know Tinder had such codes of conduct, and I obviously didn’t message him because I’d quickly gotten exasperated with the app and lost interest. However, I couldn’t help but wonder why he, after realizing that a connection had been made between us on the app, didn’t think he should send me a message. I mean, if you like somebody well enough, shouldn’t you just take the initiative and say hi, whether you swiped first or last?

At this thought, I filed away my impression of Vince as someone who thinks highly of himself.

We soon got around to the point of our connection: When are we meeting?

He lived in the Ojo area of Lagos, something that would have given me pause, had he not already made Pink Panther’s acquaintance. His house was far from mine. But because his workplace was much closer to where I live, we agreed to see on Sunday. He’d come over to mine, where he would spend the night and then head off to work the next morning.

When he got to my place that Sunday evening, the moment I let him in, he took me into his arms and began kissing me. I felt a stirring inside me, a coming-alive of my essence. But there was no need to rush. He was here now, and we had all night.

I pulled away from his embrace and said, “Calm down. Let me at least give you kola.”

Smiling, he said, “I thought I was already getting kola.”

“No,” I said with a chuckle. “In this house, I give proper kola.”

Moments later, I’d settled him down with some snacks and drink, and we carried on with a conversation while I prepared dinner in the kitchen, which was close to the parlour. We were getting to know each other more, filling in the blanks from our chats, which often comes with meeting someone face to face.

By the time I was done in the kitchen, I had a pretty good idea what kind of person Vince was and everything else I needed to know about him to be comfortable in his company. And so, I was finally ready to fuck.

But first, I had to do a quick check-up on myself – on my mangina, really. I had to check to see that there were no potholes on the expressway. That the construction was still solid, even though there hadn’t been any traffic on it in awhile.

Finally, we were in bed together, and Vince proceeded to give me one of the best sexual experiences I’d ever had.

He was good. I immediately knew this when he spread my ass open and dived in between those cheeks with his tongue and lips. He took his time sniffing and kissing on my asshole, until I couldn’t take anymore teasing. Then he licked me nice and slow, so that his wet tongue was slip-sliding across the walls of my asshole. I could feel my body releasing the tensions of the past week, as I relaxed and backed my ass into his face.

He was eating, nibbling, licking and flicking every inch of my ass, slurping up every single ounce of nectar his mouth made drip from my ass and spitting it back so that he could use it as lube to finger me with in-between licks. My muscles were quivering as I buried my face into a pillow, soft moans escaping my mouth. He smacked my ass hard, causing me to let out a tremulous “Oh yes. Do that again.”

So, he smacked my ass even harder and immediately sucked on my asshole, making me holler out again and then break into shivers.

This guy was a god, and his rimming skill was a weapon. In fact, by this time, I was so ready for his dick – which, by the way, Pinky wasn’t joking about. He was HUGE! He had a dick that was not for the faint-hearted, impressive in both length and girth. When I first set my eyes on it, I felt the flutter of fear that came with knowing I hadn’t had sex in awhile. But now, I was on a high. All that rimming was the poppers I needed.

He put on some lubricant on his sheathed dick and lathered some on my asshole as I lay on my back, facing him, ready to take him on. I even grabbed his dick, making him inch closer to me, as a sign that I was indeed ready. My legs were spread wide for him and I could feel my asshole puckering as if it was begging for his dick. He teased me a few times with his dick before finally pushing the head against the opening of my hole. That was the first and only time I made any movement that suggested pain, and he was so keen on my body language – a habit, I would come to realize, of one who was so used to having Bottoms suffer the pain of his big dick.

He inched out of me and then pushed in gently again. I forced myself to relax and allowed him to carefully work the tip in. He leaned forward and kissed me as he began pushing in inch after inch. I threw my hands around his neck, and pushed my hips forward to meet him. We were kissing as he thrust his hips into me, pushing and pulling his dick in and out of my ass in a slow but consistent rhythm. When he began to go deeper, I was getting fuller. His dick soon got to where it counts inside me, before he proceeded to fuck me, the rhythm slowly graduating in speed until he was piston-fucking me.

Vince pounded me in every position we could achieve. Missionary, spooning, doggy, with me pinned to the wall, with my legs stretched at a near-perfect angle 90 degrees. We were inexhaustible in our passion.

By the time he finally allowed himself to reach his climax, he was groaning so loudly, I was afraid my neighbours would hear him. He rammed into me one final time with a burst of energy and began spasming against me as he came.

It was glorious. I felt a liquid sense of power and satisfaction flow through me, especially when he dropped into the bed beside me, both of us sweaty and breathless, and he confessed that he couldn’t believe how well I’d taken him. That he’d never had anyone like me.

That felt very good to hear. After a long hiatus from sex, it was nice to hear that I still got it. But to be clear, I enjoyed the sex just as much as he evidently enjoyed it.

That night, before the morning came, we ended up fucking three times.

As we both left my house for work on Monday morning, I felt very much empowered by the night I’d had. Vince was like a new energy drink I’d been introduced to. All I wanted was to keep having sex with him.

Just that. Sex.

I wanted the uncomplicated, unrestrained, unburdened situation of just sex with this guy who appeared to know how to give it.

I had to advise myself that I didn’t want to develop any emotional attachment to him. The last breakup I went through had been very rough on my emotional well-being, after which I swore I’d never let any man in – at least, not for a very long time. And since gay guys usually have the tendency of unlocking the pathway to their heart after great sex, I had to remind myself that I just wanted to have sex and let it just be about sex. I didn’t want to catch feelings.

I didn’t however reckon with Vince.

In the following days after our first hookup, he was frequently checking up on me.

“Hello, how are you doing?”

“Hey dear, how was your day?”

“Just checking… how far?”

“Are you alright? What’s up with you?”

Initially, I found this to be cute. But then, his attention began to feel like a grasscutter trap snapping shut around me. If he called me and he was kept on Call Waiting because I was on another call, when we’d get around to talking, he would say, “So who were you talking to? Your boyfriend, abi?”

Whenever we were chatting and I wasn’t quick to respond to him, he’d want to know if it was my “other boyfriends” who were distracting me from our chat.

The next time he came to my house and we were lounging in the parlour, I was on my phone, checking off some WhatsApp notifications. And he again started with how I must be chatting with my boyfriend. I started to explain that I was just chatting with my friends, when I stopped myself with a thought: So what if I was? What if I was chatting with other potential hookups? He was just a hookup himself and we hadn’t had any conversation about being exclusive or about dating. Why did he keep talking about my “boyfriends” as though he was accusing me of something?

I felt a bit nettled by this, but I didn’t address it. The sex was good, and for now, that was all that mattered.

A few days later, I found myself in the middle of a family crisis. It was the sort of problem that I could only tell my very close friends; and that included Pinky. When Vince caught on to my troubled state of mind, he pressed, wanting to know what was wrong, and I gave him an abridged version of what I was going through. Expectedly, he increased the rate of his communication, constantly wanting to know how I was. I appreciated this very much.

Then one day, as I was going about my day, trying to balance work and family, my phone went off. I wasn’t in a position to charge it, and so I was offline for a great part of the day. In that time, Vince had apparently tried to reach me to no avail. Finally, he reached out to Pinky, wanting to know if he had been in touch with me. Pinky knew exactly what I was up to, but he rightfully didn’t think Vince deserved to know. As long as Pinky was concerned, Vince was nothing serious to me. So even though Vince kept pressing for him to get in touch with me, all Pinky had to say to him was that I was fine and that I would be in touch when I could.

Much to my amusement as I heard the story later told, Vince had responded to Pinky’s assurances with a patronizing “are you sure” or something like that, a remark intended to imply that Pinky didn’t know something about his friend that he, Vince, knew. LOL. My friend is a firecracker, and this condescension provoked him into responding: “Vince, you’ve only known this guy like five seconds. I’ve known him more than half my life. Please, stay in your lane.”

When I eventually got back online and Vince was able to get through to me, he fumed about his altercation with my friend, telling me about how he came close to blocking Pinky because of his response. I was ticked off by this. I didn’t understand what this guy’s deal was. It was nice that he cared, but we hadn’t gotten to that stage in our situationship where he should care this much, to the extent of harassing my friends. I checked him on this, letting him know that there were boundaries I expected him to respect. Getting into a spat with my friend because he felt more entitled to me was just not appropriate. He apologized and we moved on.

We began having a lot of sex. He also became such a regular visitor at my place that sometimes, on those Sundays when he’d want to spend the night at mine to go to work the next day, he’d call, and if I knew I wouldn’t make it back home from work, I would tell him where to find my key and let himself in. I knew he expected to spend those Sunday nights with me, but I couldn’t help the hectic inflexibility of my job. Some periods, we’d work so endlessly in the office, that rooms in a nearby hotel would be booked for those of us who live far from work. There are times when I don’t get to see my house for days on end. As a regular nine-to-fiver, Vince didn’t seem to understand this work schedule I operated on. And each time I couldn’t make a Sunday night with him, he’d sound very querulous and doubtful on the phone, as though he didn’t believe me when I said I was at work.

He would nag and complain so much that I found myself wondering one day: Isn’t this what they say Bottoms do? That Tops are aloof while Bottoms are the ones so desperate for attention, we would complain about and cling to situations we should let go of? Bottoms are made out to be the dramatic, emotional gays who suffocate their boyfriends with their need, while the Tops just want to be left alone.

In fact, with my last two relationships, I’d been exactly this stereotypical Bottom; always stressing myself over the guys who often acted like they couldn’t be bothered. Now finding myself in a position where I felt suffocated and irritated by the other guy’s demands on my time felt very alien. These were not the shoes I was used to wearing.

Vince and I eventually ended with the kind of unceremoniousness that one wouldn’t expect, considering how we started with a bang. One day, he called twice. But I was at work, in a disciplinary panel. I couldn’t answer. When I was done, I called him back once.

He didn’t answer.

I didn’t call again.

He didn’t call back.

And we haven’t spoken to each other since then.

Written by JBoy